You get what you pay for.

What do you think of when I say “you get what you pay for”? The first thought that some of you might have, may be about paying very little for a service and getting some shoddy work done. However, if I say “what about in food service”? Was the first thing you thought of something along the lines of “well sure, you pay $.99 for a burger, you should not expect the best quality”. Of course it would be simple if that was the topic I was trying to discuss; however, it is not.

Recently, I was reminded of two times where I couldn't stop laughing about something that happened to me while in the drive-thru at a fast food establishment. The first involved going to McDonald’s with my sister and ordering several McFlurry’s. We had various ones with different toppings, but it was when we got to the last one that we started having a problem. We wanted one McFlurry, plain, or basically just the ice cream in a cup. We received several reasons for why it was impossible to make a plain McFlurry, ranging from “it couldn’t be entered into the register”, to “the spoon only gets added when it is used to mix the topping into the ice cream”. It took almost five minutes of arguing in the drive-thru and then finally getting a manager into the conversation before the employees were shown how easy it could be done. I was recently at Dairy Queen, and I started laughing hysterically when I wondered how they might handle a person asking for a blizzard with no toppings.

The second event involved an incident at Burger King; however, it also dealt with ordering an item plain. Unfortunately, when you order a double cheeseburger plain, you should still expect to get cheese on it, otherwise it would be a double hamburger and not a cheeseburger. The employee defended what they did by saying that “plain meant nothing on it”.

I am sure that some of you might consider these incidents as standard for the fast food industry, but I can honestly say that there are “some” fast food establishments that I absolutely enjoy going to since I have never had an issue with the products or service I receive. So it makes me wonder, have you ever thought that paying employees crappy wages results in getting crappy products/service? If you have ever eaten at an In-n-Out, you would know what paying employees a good wage does for service and quality food.

So what do you think? Do you get what you pay for with regard to employee wages?